In stark contrast to the AFT’s previous commitments, its 2024 conference reads like a left-wing playbook.
The American Federation of Teachers has gone from representing educators to training activists.
T eachers’ unions are infamous for their sweeping political power and unrivaled influence over public education in the United States. But this wasn’t always so.
Hard as it may be to believe today, the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) were once apolitical. As Hoover Institution scholar Mike Hartney noted, in the 1950s, most teachers felt that political activity beyond voting was unnecessary. Significant changes to states’ public-sector labor laws beginning in the 1960s, however, granted teachers’ unions the ability to collectively bargain with state and local governments, thereby providing these organizations with an opportunity to convert teachers into activists.
Still, the AFT remained committed to improving public education through the early 1980s. President Ronald Reagan agreed. During his remarks at AFT’s 1983 annual convention, the president commended the union for its “recognition of the need to upgrade math and science education,” in addition to its “ringing condemnation” of groups who “manipulate curriculum” to be “more aimed at frightening and brainwashing American schoolchildren, than at fostering learning and stimulating balanced, intelligent debate.”
The AFT’s 1983 convention report reaffirmed its commitment to improving education with practical strategies such as “stricter high school graduation requirements,” “increased homework assignments,” “tougher requirements for student discipline,” and “the use of fair and objective testing.”
Likewise, AFT described its vision for teacher improvement in terms of “higher teacher certification requirements” and the “implementation of fair and practical methods for removing incompetent teachers.”
AFT’s vision for public education has clearly shifted. While AFT continues to provide its members with opportunities to discuss public education, sessions offered during its 2024 Share My Lesson Conference in March demonstrate the union’s eagerness to do precisely what Reagan warned against: “exploit teaching positions and manipulate curriculum for propaganda purposes.”
Several sessions during the conference are especially representative of AFT’s resolve to replace critical thought with ideological groupthink. In her keynote address, for example, AFT president Randi Weingarten sensibly acknowledged the threat of artificial intelligence to critical thought in education, assuring teachers that “we present facts and help our students learn how to think critically. Not what to know, but how to learn.”
Weingarten’s solution is a union-wide subscription to the “anti-misinformation tool” called NewsGuard. While NewsGuard claims to use “apolitical and transparent data” to issue “credibility scores” for more than 35,000 online sources, the tool seeks to institutionalize left-wing bias rather than stoke critical thought. On average, NewsGuard rates liberal sources 27 points higher than conservative news organizations, often treating progressive opinion as objective truth.
Other sessions offered propagandized lesson plans to public-school teachers directly. During “Authoritarianism vs. Democracy,” teachers were introduced to “Trump’s 2020 Challenge to Democracy,” a lesson plan that asks students to denigrate the former president.
Additional social-justice-inspired presentations focused on non-academic issues. During a session titled “Helping Educators Create Identity Safety and Belonging in Schools,” presenters argued that all bullying stems from identity-based power imbalances, and failing to acknowledge identity-based differences (ranging from race to sexuality) in the classroom is a “barrier to inclusion.”
Perhaps more concerning, during “The State of Mandated Support in Education,” AFT staff called for an overhaul of the “problematic” mandatory-reporting system, which requires teachers to report suspected abuse or neglect of students to Child Protective Services. The union argued that this process “activates implicit bias. . . [that] interferes with child protection and exacerbates problems.”
In stark contrast to AFT’s previous commitments, its 2024 conference reads like a left-wing playbook meant to inspire a new generation of political activists rather than improve public schools. Certainly, there is no shortage of problems in education that need to be addressed: Teacher satisfaction and student success have hit record lows. It’s clear that AFT has the wrong priorities.
President Reagan’s concluding remarks to AFT members in 1983 ring true today: “America’s not a defeatist nation. We came back from Pearl Harbor to win the greatest military victory in history. We came back from the shock of Sputnik to send our astronauts to the moon and bring them safely home. I believe the nation that met those great challenges can surely meet another.”
To fulfill the promises it made to teachers, students, and families years ago, AFT must reprioritize student success over ideological nonsense, equipping teachers to meet the “great challenge” of public education, once and for all.